Gigi - Best Picture of 1958
The Vincente Minelli musical that took top prize half a century ago
The French they are a funny race, it's been said - and when it was said musically in 1958, the result was the Oscar for Best Picture
Best Picture of 1958
Fifty years ago, an aspiring courtesan came of age in a complicated romance with a bored boulevardier. This unlikely coupling was the result of another - that of MGM's high-steppin' Freed unit with the tasteful talkiness of composers Lerner and Loew. Both twinnings clicked, however, and 1958's Gigi took home the Oscar for Best Picture.
A Musical of Manners
As genres go, the Arthur Freed-produced, Vincente Minnelli-directed Gigi is in a class by itself. This lush production is not a comedy of manners but a musical of manners. The film is a saucy, tempered fantasia on the mores and folkways of early 20th century France. And those ways, of course, include the very DNA of France: romance - as embodied by the central conflict between unfeeling playboy Louis Jourdan and that marionette-like miniature Leslie Caron, as the not-so-innocent title character.
Chevalier Charms
Commenting on the courtship throughout is the ultimate Parisian ambassador, Maurice Chevalier, in the role of Jourdan's philosophical uncle. Despite its title and coming-of-age story, the film firmly belongs to white-haired supporting player Chevalier, who delights in strutting in and out of frame cheerfully chirping "Cheri" and establishing a whole new catalogue of signature songs: Thank Heaven For Little Girls, I'm Glad I'm Not Young Anymore, and that musical onset of Alzheimer's, Ah Yes! I Remember It Well. It's a bouncy bonhomie the straw-hatted singer hadn't displayed on screen since his heyday in the pre-code musicals of the charmingly naughty Ernst Lubitsch.
Caron Captures
This is not to say that Caron doesn't steal your heart. Her sweet and sour manner, wide, responsive eyes and appropriately careful physicality perfectly personify the spirit, beauty and poised naturalism of Impressionist era femininity. Even Jourdan's sophisticated simplicity, which comes across as uninteresting directness in so many other films, manages to win you over here, thanks to a good, hard push by a couple of memorable songs (including It's a Bore and Gigi.)
Good But Not Great
But for all of its frills, Gigi - at least in my book - can be catalogued as good Minelli, not great. Nowhere among its endless, showy wide shots, extravagantly tasteful art direction, and chirpy, breezy score will you locate even a soupcon of the spirited, all-American abandon that found its way into each of his other musicals, even his other France-set tale, An American in Paris.
Still, as Chevalier might reflect, we remember it well.
